just another maths blog

More “pay to publish” fun

Will a “pay to publish” outfit just take any nonsense and put it online for a few hundred dollars? (See my post Academic Spam for some background.)

Well, at least in one case, someone has tested it and found that they will….

Firstly we need some nonsensical vaguely math-like content. Fortunately someone has written a program to generate random nonsensical “mathy” papers – here’s an example (mathgen-735479847) that’s “authored” by me and John. The program can be found at http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/mathgen if you want a “paper” yourself.

Then they submitted it to one of the self-styled “journals” that regularly spam my mailbox, and probably yours… and for the rest of the story I’ll just point you to the original.